How do you forensically investigate an injury that is more than a month old? I don't know, but Eugene Melnyk is doing it, goddammit. Back in February, recently-reformed goon Matt Cooke took Erik Karlsson into the boards on a hit that left the Senators defenseman clutching his Achilles tendon. Cooke's skate had apparently cut through his equipment and cut through the tendon.

Erik Karlsson, the reigning Norris Trophy winner as the NHL's best defenseman, was putting on…
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Karlsson required surgery and was initially presumed to be gone for the year but he may yet return should the Senators advance far enough in the playoffs. Heat-of-the-moment reactions from the Senators were decidedly in the "it was intentional, it's Cooke for crying out loud" camp.

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Fast forward to today—March 27—and at least one member of the Ottawa family is still beating that drum. Melnyk appeared on Canadian radio saying that he will use forensic doctors to prove that Cooke intentionally injured Karlsson.

"You watch. It may be public. It may not public, but it's between me and the league. I think it was intentional. But you have to be able to prove it. And from all the television angles that we saw you can't see it, it was so fast. But the force that that skate had to go through a sock, a sub-sock, then your skin, muscle, sheath, and then to get to your tendon? Man. Either this guy's really good or very lucky at being able to do that."

This is [for the sake of argument] an interesting theory. I just don't know how you can use science and technology to prove that Matt Cooke intentionally used an excessive amount of force to propel his skate through a sock, a sub-sock, skin, muscle, sheath and tendon. The camera angles are the camera angles. There's no extra test that can be performed to bring new evidence to light, or disprove previously believed evidence.

It's possible he is calling in the MythBusters to run a series of experiments to show the likelihood of that series of events transpiring in a purely accidental manner. This is the kind of just weird oddities and not at all mythical kind of things they've been reduced to exploring now, right? That makes about as much sense, right?

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Jamie: [furrows brow] Now, a hockey skate is basically a shoe on a very sharp blade, right?